Google commissioned me to write this White Paper (“First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results“), so I thought I’d pass it along. I wrote the paper as an advocate, and not as a disinterested academic, but I hope some of our readers might find it interesting nonetheless. Here is the Introduction, though of course it isn’t intended to be persuasive on its own — the supporting arguments are in the rest of the paper:Once, the leading sources to which people turned for useful information were newspapers, guidebooks, and encyclopedias. Today, these sources also include search engine results, which people use (along with other sources) to learn about news, local institutions, products, services, and many other matters. Then and now, the First Amendment has protected all these forms of speech from government attempts to regulate what they present or how they present it. And this First Amendment protection has applied even when the regulations were motivated by a concern about what some people see as “fairness.”

Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speakers. First, they sometimes convey information that the search engine company has itself prepared or compiled (such as information about places appearing in Google Places). Second, they direct users to material created by others, by referencing the titles of Web pages that the search engines judge to be most responsive to the query, coupled with short excerpts from each page. Such reporting about others’ speech is itself constitutionally protected speech.

Third, and most valuably, search engines select and sort the results in a way that is aimed at giving users what the search engine companies see as the most helpful and useful information. (That is how each search engine company tries to keep users coming back to it rather than to its competitors.) This selection and sorting is a mix of science and art: It uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers’ judgments about what material users are most likely to find responsive to their queries.

SOME names have legendary status in the business of branding. Viagra and BlackBerry roll off the tongue and capture something about the products they represent. But could the naming process, which relies so heavily on human creativity, ever be carried out by a machine?

Judging by the results from the artificial intelligence system developed by a team at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trentino, Italy, it can. They studied 1000 brand and company names in a bid to break down naming into a step-by-step process. Then they wrote software that they claim mimics that process.

“A name doesn’t come out of the blue,” says team member Carlo Strapparava. “There is a technique, and when there is a technique it is possible to think computationally.”

Oddwerx Robots Run ROS on Your Smartphone for $99POSTED BY: EVAN ACKERMAN  /  WED, APRIL 18, 2012. Youve heard of ROS. Its big. Its scary. It powers $400,000 robots through laundry like nobodys business. But its also more than that, because lots of different robots can and do run ROS, even robots that are easy for you to program and easier for you to afford, like this $99 smartphone robot kit from OLogic called Oddwerx.Oddwerx is a Bluetooth-enabled robotic smartphone dock on tank treads. You can put your iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android phone on it to act as a brain, and run an app that gives the bot a little virtual personality of sorts with vision and face recognition and stuff. A concept similar to Romotive, which we mentioned here. So thats kind of neat, but its not really why youd want one.

Youd want one because the Oddwerx was designed from the ground up to be hackable and extendable with a focus on modular sensors and support for open source and advanced R&D robotics.What this means is that your little Oddwerx robot with your little smartphone on it is entirely capable of running big bad ROS, and especially if you dont have much experience with robots, youd be hard pressed to find anything so capable for so cheap. Plus, you remember that the whole point of ROS is that you can benefit from the hard work and cleverness of people smarter than you and steal borrow things to get your robot to do cool stuff. Note that you need an Android phone, to run ROSJava, a pure Java implementation of ROS developed jointly by Google and Willow Garage. Heres an example:The only caveat to all of this is that the Oddwerx is on Kickstarter right now, and theyve still got a little or, okay, kind of a lot ways to go before theyll have enough funding to send you a bot. A $99 pledge which, remember, you dont actually pay if things dont work out is enough to get you a complete robot kit, and youve got eight days and counting to take the plunge.

via Oddwerx Robots Run ROS on Your Smartphone for $99 – IEEE Spectrum.

Not content with your new, 1.4-billion-transistor Ivy Bridge processor? Maybe it runs too hot, or lacks the polygon-pushing powers that you require? Well, I’ve got just the thing for you: How about you augment it with a DIY 8-bit CPU?

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | April 26, 2012, 8:40am PDT

Summary: Canonical’s latest Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04, is now available for your home and office and it’s a winner.

What do you do when your Gmail account is nearly full? You can either purchase additional storage from Google (they charge $5 per year for 20 GB) or a cheaper alternative is that you scan your Gmail mailbox for messages that contain large file attachments and delete (or forward) all the useless messages to recover precious space.

The problem is how do you find these bulky messages in your mailbox when Gmail doesn’t offer an option to sort and filter messages by size?

]]> http://godwincaruana.me/?feed=rss2&p=867 0 http://godwincaruana.me/?p=864 http://godwincaruana.me/?p=864#comments Sat, 21 Apr 2012 07:16:14 +0000 admin http://godwincaruana.me/?p=864

(Read More...)]]> Although the issue of Web openness has been mostly quiet of late, it was revived after Google’s Sergey Brin made some powerful statements to the Guardian. According to him, the freedom of the Internet is under a greater threat than it has ever been before.“I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he tells the Guardian. “It’s scary.”Brin also indicated that he and fellow Google co-founder Larry Page would not be able to build their search engine in the current Internet environment given restrictive players such as Facebook. He categorized both Facebook and Apple as “walled gardens” saying they have too many limitations within their services.As one can imagine, Brin’s statements have gained a considerable amount of criticism. What’s more, his perspective has also reignited the debate over what true openness actually is and what real threats lie with it.

via Is the Internet Becoming Less Open? | WebProNews.

Katayou Farrah presents this paper that suggests that human interaction data, or human proximity, obtained by Bluetooth sensor data, can be integrated with human location data, obtained by mobile cell tower connections, to mine meaningful details about human activities from large and noisy datasets. Farrah proposed a bag of multimodal behavior, which integrates the modeling of variations of location over multiple time-scales, and the modeling of interaction types from proximity. The representation is simple yet robust to characterize real-life human behavior sensed from mobile phones, which produce data known to be noisy or incomplete. Farrah describes an unsupervised approach, based on topic models, to discover latent human activities in terms of the joint interaction and location behaviors of 97 individuals over the course of a 10-month period. Some of the human activities discovered with a multimodal data representation include “going out alone from 7pm-midnight alone” and “working from 11am-5pm with 3-5 other people” occurring on Mondays. The paper also reports dominant work patterns occurring on other days of the week, such as Sunday work patterns, which occur from 5pm-midnight in small groups. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of our human routines discovered by predicting missing multimodal phone data, with a probabilistic topic model approach

Armed with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers hope to create intelligent software agents — smart programs that can first observe and learn from human programmers and then help humans write code faster and with fewer errors. Based at Penn, the five-year effort is dubbed Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering, or ExCAPE. It is funded by the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program, which supports ambitious research agendas that will define the future of computing.